If you're an indie retailer, you know the struggles we face - competition, costs, and playing field slanted against us. The goal of this blog is to slant the field a little bit back in our direction.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Are You Saying Something Remarkable? (Would You Like to?)

What do your ads say?

Wait, let me rephrase that.

What do your ads say that is truly worth remembering?

I know what you say about your advertising.

“We’ve tried that and it didn’t work.”“We don’t have that in our budget.”“We only believe in word-of-mouth.”“We only do ‘event-advertising’.”“We had to cut advertising because of the economy.”

The reason your ads didn't work is because they weren't remarkable. No one heard them, let alone remembered them.

A 1978 Yankelovich study showed that the average American received 2,000 advertising messages a day. In a revised study in 2008 that number is now 5,000. Without a remarkable, memorable message, you'll never stand out in a crowd of 5,000.

Chances are, you have a remarkable, memorable message. You just haven’t been telling it.

You’ve been saying your name over and over under the false belief that just repeating your name thousands of times will give it top-of-mind salience. But what if people don’t know what your name means? Or worse yet, they have a negative association with that name, or an indifferent one?

There are ways to make your marketing stand out, to make it memorable. And it all starts with the message. Finding your truly remarkable, memorable message is the single most important element of your success in advertising. Yet, it is the most common mistake.

As you worry over demographics, reach, circulation, viewership, listenership; who is hearing or seeing your ad, you neglect to think about what you are telling them. As you worry about cost-per-ad, cost-per-click, cost-per-inch, cost-per-viewer; you neglect the cost of not saying anything worth remembering.

The result? Blah, blah, blah. Don’t you think that with 5,000 ad messages a day we learn to filter out the vast majority of it? If it isn’t interesting, we aren’t paying attention. If it isn’t remarkable, we aren’t remembering.

The message is king. A remarkable, memorable message works well no matter what medium you use to deliver it. A remarkable, memorable message works well no matter how many people hear or see it. A remarkable, memorable message can even buy you that coveted word-of-mouth.

I still have customers talking about our Men’s Bathroom radio ad even though it hasn’t been on the air for over 10 months!

Here’s the hard part. Finding your message means digging deep into the heart of your business, brushing away all the secondary messages until you find the one core thing worth saying. It means uncovering the real you inside your business, the unvarnished and genuine you. And it means having the guts to tell the world about the real you.

Do you have the guts?

Good! Here’s the first step. Go to Freebies on my website and download the ebook Understanding Your Brand. Follow those directions. When you get done, send me your results. I’ll help you find something worth saying.

I know there’s a message in there. Together we can pull it out and make your marketing truly remarkable.